Recently I was in a yoga class, and we had reached the final pose – shavasana. If you aren’t familiar, it’s the last three to five minutes of class where you lay on the ground perfectly still and do nothing, like a corpse. After 110 minutes of work, you get five minutes of rest, letting go, and receiving your practice.
It’s kind of the whole reason you go to yoga.
I’m splayed out like a corpse and someone must have forgotten to turn their phone off, because I can hear the distant ping of their email coming in every few seconds. Now I’m not going to get all self-righteous about yoga etiquette. I can honestly say that it was not that big of a deal. It was very faint and my hunch is most of the class didn’t even notice it.
For the record, I am so self-conscious about my phone ringing in places where it’s not supposed to – movies, lectures, library, yoga – that I am compulsively checking it twelve times prior but that’s just me because my worst nightmare is being THAT person.
So as I am in the final pose, trying to clear my head, there’s this email ping, ping, ping and it totally takes me back to about two years ago when I turned off the email chime on my smart phone.
Until then I had been working and helping run a small non-profit. We had four or five different email addresses that I was responsible for and all of them came to my phone and all of them chimed when I got new mail. Even when my phone was silenced, it buzzed. It was a constant reminder of all the things that needed to get done.
Looking back, that chime had so much control over me, but at the same time, with every ping I was hearing – We need you. You are needed. You are needed. You are needed. Right now. Right now. Right now.
I had created a story for myself that I was a better employee and leader if I was taking care of things more or less immediately. That being in demand made me important. The more hours I worked, the more email I was able to field, the more accomplished I was. I totally fed into the idea that my value came from how quickly and efficiently I could handle the barrage of emails coming in every day.
I would complain and moan and groan. But the truth is I was kind of addicted to it. It temporarily filled a void that I had been struggling with as a new parent. It was a break from the demands of my young kids and my house and my marriage. It was an opportunity to be needed in another realm away from snack maker, book reader, laundry lugger, I-told-you-400-times-not-to-do-that reminder.
When I did finally choose to leave that job, to reset myself and make another effort to connect with my purpose, I had the great pleasure of turning the email chime off. I’ve been discovering that being needed is not a foundation to build a career, or even a life.
I couldn’t really quiet my mind in shavasana with the distant ping bringing me back to me own story, but I was able to think through this whole post in my head. A good reminder how easy it is to place value in the quantity and frequency of our email pings. How easy it is to get lost in the cult of busy. We are all so much more than that.
PS If you’re wondering how my yoga inversions are going (whole story here), I can now do a head stand and tripod stand against the wall. Still working on moving away from the wall, but seeing some progress!
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